' The Longest Night ' & ' Crossing the Rubicon ': The Original Map Illustrated and Uncut Final Volume (Armageddon's Song) (30 page)

He sat facing strangers, although not all were unknowns. A former SACEUR headed the British Council, as they called themselves.

“I will get straight to the point.” The President said, addressing them all. “The United States of America takes a very dim view of the events which have transpired over the previous forty eight hours.”

They listened, looking back at him, their expressions neutral.

“May I ask what the intentions are of you Europeans with regard to the war?” he continued with only the barest of pauses. “Now that your own borders are again secure, is it your intention to make peace with the People’s Republic of China?”

“Mr President.” The retired British general began. “By mutual agreement I am speaking for all of us on this side of the Atlantic, and we fully expected a deep concern to be expressed by the USA.” He paused, taking a sip of water before continuing. “We regret we will be unable to continue…”

Here it comes, thought the President, we are unable to continue the war but we are grateful for the assistance of the United States, etc etc….

“…until we have reorganised and reconstituted our units, those that fought in Germany and in the Atlantic. Some battalions and regiments must amalgamate and some air force squadrons will disappear temporarily from the order of battle, their equipment and personnel absorbed into other units…”

The President sat up a little straighter.

“…but we are assembling the necessary shipping, and we will each have one mechanised brigade ready for transportation and deployment to the Far East by the end of this week, a Corps in total, and others to follow later.”

The Europeans were not calling it a day, Australia and New Zealand were not being written off, and America was not finding itself standing alone.

CHAPTER two

Australia

(3 minutes: 10 seconds after the Chinese ICBM launch)

Ian McLennan Park, Kembla, Woolongong: New South Wales. 40 miles south of Sydney.

Friday 19
th
October. 2353hrs.

All was quiet; the sky was as of diamonds strewn on black velvet. Certainly no one still living in Port Kembla could remember there ever
not
being light pollution before the enforced blackouts. On the odd previous occasion that a brown-out occurred, Sydney was only a mere 40 miles away and the glow from the city that never quite slept, would eclipse the stars to the north. Now of course, nature’s great free light show was available to all, weather permitting.

Master Sergeant Bart Kopak of the 11
th
Armored ‘Black Horse’ Cavalry Regiment had once more ‘dropped by’ on the excuse of seeing how things were with the Brit unit he had, for a time, acted as liaison to. His tank company’s fighting positions were sited to cover the beaches at Kilalea State Park and Minnamurra, ten miles away. His company location was now no longer at the racetrack with divisional headquarters, but on a field beside the Shellharbour Club, closer to where it was expected to fight. Bart seemed to manage to find plenty of reasons to visit the divisions HQ though.

Vehicles that were not on emergency business were not permitted to approach the man-made hill occupied by the ‘The Queen Elizabeth’s Combat Team’ during the hours of darkness
and so Bart left his Humvee at the bottom of the hill with his load bearing equipment in the back. It was a beautiful night and he hoped that would play in his favour when he saw Rebecca. Taking just his M-16 he walked the rest of the way, first looking in on the small unit’s commander. Captain Hector Sinclair Obediah Wantage-Ferdoux, RTR, otherwise known as ‘Obi Wan’ to his troops and simply ‘Heck’ to everyone else, had just returned from Darwin with the main tank gun rounds and the two 120mm rifled barrels that had been gathering dust. The practice of not keeping all of ones eggs in one basket was well under way at the ordnance depot. It had been a hive of activity, dispersing its stored munitions to a multitude of smaller, scattered magazines along the coast. As a consequence it had taken six hours before anyone had been available to begin loading up their trucks with the boxes of rounds. The needs of the small British contingent were pretty low on the depots list of priorities. Heck was tired and hungry so Bart did not stay long and left the British tanker to it.

Sgt Rebecca Hemmings was not at the REME LAD area but was instead taking her turn on the watch keepers stag roster in the CP. Bart’s arrival was an excuse to step outside for a breath of air. The sentries and those manning the CP
were in CBRN Dress State 3, they all wore clumsy NBC overshoes, smock and trousers. Gloves (Cotton: Inner: Small) already inserted in the rubber outer protective gloves in the respirator case with the mask ready for instant use. Her hair was dusty, sweaty and needed its daily wash. Hardly glamorous attire, but to Bart’s eyes Rebecca could just as well have been in crystal slippers, ball gown and wearing a diamond tiara.

They lay on the grass bank looking at the stars and talking about anything but the reason for his constant visits. Bart had been steeling himself all day for what he wanted to now say. He had run through in his head every word of a prepared speech but just as he was about to broach the subject
Rebecca sat up, suddenly alert.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Sssh!” She hushed him. “Listen.”

Her ears were better than his but then he picked up the faint sound of a distant siren.

The fire stations, police stations and town halls all had installed air raid sirens upon the roof of the buildings and they had been sounded for the well-publicised air raid drills and civil defence exercises. The drills had become progressively more numerous to the point where they were in danger of becoming self-defeating, and road traffic accidents had quadrupled with the onset of the mandatory blackout. Australians were increasingly inclined to stay indoors when the air raid sirens sounded.

The distant siren was joined by another, and then another, with more joining in until every siren along the coast was sounding that mournful wail.

“I didn’t hear this advertised on the radio.” Rebecca said standing and looking out across the town.

“STAND TO!” Tony McMarn’s voice bellowed from the direction of the CP and someone began bashing mess tins together, the audible warning for troops in the field to suit up and mask up.

Rebecca immediately stopped breathing and pulled her respirator from its case.

“Shit.” Bart cursed. The perfect moment ruined by an unscheduled drill.

The light came then, and both his and Rebecca’s shadows appeared briefly before disappearing in the harsh whiteout glare of a nuclear explosion.

Somewhere someone screamed, someone who had been looking north at that moment.

They both dropped to the ground and gradually the light lost some of its awful intensity. Rebecca pulled on her gloves, and now fully suited she squeezed his arm, shouting at him to get to his NBC kit also. Then she nodded a quick farewell and left, sprinting back to the CP as fast as her overshoes allowed.

There were a series of explosions somewhere, the biggest emergency maroons he had ever heard, and they were all in the sky above.

“It has started.” he said to himself and risked a look to the northern horizon where a massive fireball sat above what must be Sydney. Bart picked up his M-16 and ran back across the hilltop in the direction of his Humvee.

In the CP there had been shock, but training had taken over and they were moving out to the combat teams FV-432 armoured command vehicle.

The infantrymen of the Royal Green Jackets were pulling closed the troop doors of the Warrior IFVs, and the four Challenger IIs were starting up.

Everything in the CP’s 9 X 9 tent, attached to its rear, from maps, to Watchkeeper’s Logs was transferred. The tentage was just for practicality anyway, room to breathe.

Transfer complete and
Rebecca ran back to her CRARRV, the armoured repair and recovery vehicle version of the Challenger I. She slowed as she came across a fallen figure but she did not stop. NAIAD had activated after the overhead explosions and was still sounding its alarm.

On reaching the vehicle she clambered up its armoured glacis to the hatch, removing her webbing and passing it down inside before following it through and sealing the way behind her.

Tears coursed down her face behind the eye pieces of her respirator as she plugged in the radio jack.

Heck’s voiced sounded immediately, asking each callsign for a sitrep. They answered in turn; the individual tanks, the infantry fighting vehicles, the QM and the combat teams attached personnel. Heck would have his ‘Higher’ demanding a sitrep of him so they answered clearly and concisely. The combat team had one wounded; an infantryman with severe eye injuries from the nuclear flash, and one of the QM’s storemen was missing, as yet unaccounted for. 

“Hello Sunray Eight Eight this is Sunray Tango, send sitrep, over?”

She took a deep breath before answering.

“Eight Eight, negative Casrep this callsign but one times Kilo India Alpha from our friends, over.” 

Indian Ocean.

0003hrs.

A pitch black night on an ocean running ten foot swells. Only the unbroken cloud covers internal electrical activity, offered any respite, or any visual clue as to the position of the horizon. It was a place without life, too deep, too far from shore or reef to support fish, and too hostile for non-aquatic life to survive. Just briefly, for a moment, the wind carried the sound of helicopter rotor blades fading to nothingness. Once they had departed only the sound of the wind and waves remained, although a stench of diesel increased by the moment.

Flotsam burst to the surface, freshly rendered wooden fittings, the splintered grain almost white against more weathered areas. Paperwork appeared to percolate up from the depths, single sheets, an old copy of
The West Australian
and a waterlogged paperback book, Neville Shute’s
'On the Beach'
. To this detritus of tragedy were added fearful cries, spluttering, and a flailing of limbs.

Two young women and five men, hundreds of miles from the nearest land, coughing and spluttering, with sinuses flooded with salt water and in shock. The only survivors of the Royal Australian Navy diesel electric submarine, HMAS
Hooper.

Several minutes passed before the relief of still being alive took hold, but there then followed the full weight of their situation, their deaths were merely postponed.

Commander Reg Hollis struggled to make sense of what had happened. He had been beside a junior ratings mess, speaking to Petty Officer Penman, and the boat was at sixty feet, snorkelling to charge their depleted batteries. A violent explosion somewhere forward had plunged the vessel into darkness, and the sea burst in as the boat turned vertical, facing the bottom of the Indian Ocean, five miles down.

The greatest cause of death to submariners in both peace and war is not drowning but onboard fire and explosion. An emergency oxygen generator producing hydrogen and coming
into contact with seawater, which will cause a fire, or volatile torpedo fuel igniting explosively, those are the main culprits.

He had heard nothing prior to the explosion, no alert, no closing screw noises, just nothing.

A second explosion split open the vessel a moment later while she was still near the surface, venting air in a giant gout of an oxygen bubble which propelled wreckage and crew members, the dead and the living, towards the nearby surface and that was how he and several members of the crew were here, floundering in the waves.

Something bumped against him, startling him; he put out a hand to fend it off and touched a mattress in its waterproof plastic cover. He clung to it gratefully for a moment before calling out, telling anyone who could hear to swim towards the sound of his voice.

The first to reach him was male, and that was all he could discern. It was too dark to see anything but another’s head above water.

“Grab a hold of this.” Reg helped him get a grip on the mattress. “Commander Hollis here, who’s that?”

“AB Daly sir.” Able Seaman Philip Daly, a career sailor who could probably have made PO by now but for an over fondness of beer and fighting during runs ashore.

“What happened, sir?”

“No idea, absolutely no clue, sorry…who else got out?”

“I heard PO Penman shouting, and there are a couple of others, a few bodies too.”

They could hear others and together they kicked, steering the mattress in the direction of the sounds of splashing and choking.

Leading Seaman Craig Devonshire and AB Stephanie Priestly were together towing PO Penman. A few minutes later Honorary Acting Sub Lieutenant Chloe Ennis emerged from out of the darkness. Chloe was the baby of the wardroom and in reality still a Midshipman, temporarily promoted at a local level because she was a hell of a more pleasant visage than Tommo, the Engineering Officer.

Last to arrive was LS Paul Brown, vomiting up diesel fuel he had swallowed inadvertently. 

They were all about done in, and the Petty Officer clung to the mattress as his rescuers panted and gasped. There was very little room around the mattress for seven of them, and only room for one, the injured petty office to get a grip with both hands.

LS Devonshire had a waterproof pen light which he awkwardly lit, and they then got to take stock of their situation.

“Is there anyone else, did you hear anyone else out there?”

They had not but Reg had them all call out together as they and the mattress reached the apex of a swell.

Only the lonely wind replied.

Taking the torch Reg shone the light at each of them in turn. He wondered if he looked as shocked and scared as they did. Young Stephanie’s eyes were as large as saucers, but it was the Petty Officer he was most concerned about.

Derek Penman was deathly pale, and a deep cut in his scalp was leaking blood down the side of his head into the water.

“The way I see it.” said Reg. “We have six hours until dawn, we just have to hang on and stay awake until then.”

He shared a little hope with them.

“There is a yank nuke in the area out of Pearl, she was to relieve us and she had our course and speed.” He said earnestly.

“They’ll find us in the morning.”

Reg shone the light again at the injured man, noting his out of focus stare.

“Petty Officer…Derek, can you hold on for six hours?”

PO Penman paused and then nodded.

The cold was invasive, eating into the tissues of the body and Reg knew that if they were going to see the light of day they had to do something positive to stay awake.